


Pinkverse

by lil_mistake_boi



Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alien Gerard Way, Alternate Universe - Aliens, Angst, Fluff and Angst, Fluff and Smut, M/M, Pain, Smut, Zombie Frank Iero, a lot of what?, i am trash but i regret nothing, i'd like to apologize beforehand bc this is a lot, there are a lot of untagged characters in here
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 21:05:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,021
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16145498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lil_mistake_boi/pseuds/lil_mistake_boi
Summary: Gerard is searching the galaxy for something to inspire his next album. Frank is just trying to exist quietly. When their lives intersect, neither of them are prepared for the chaos and color of repercussions.aka, a-little-girl-gemini 's alien!au that they gave me permission to write forON HOLD UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.





	Pinkverse

**Author's Note:**

> I'd just like to thank my co-creator, [Callum.](https://a-little-girl-gemini.tumblr.com/) You put up with a lot, and I appreciate it.

In life, Frank hated Mondays. He hated them all the more in death.

 

In life, Mondays meant waking up to the incessant screeching of an alarm clock at six thirty in the morning, followed immediately by the unceremonious pounding of the snooze button about fifty billion times. Mondays meant rushed showers in cold water because the building was ancient and the old pipes took almost twenty minutes to warm up in the morning. Mondays meant cold pop-tarts shoved hastily into his mouth as he sprinted out of his apartment and into the busy foot traffic below, pants barely secured over his ass. Mondays meant coming very close to being late to work at the gas station, where Frank’s manager would look down on him as though he were some irredeemable loser because of it. Mondays meant an entire shift feeling like his manager was right because he was thirty-fucking-three and still working as a clerk in the local Kum & Go without any prospects.

 

Mondays meant getting off work at three pm and hauling ass to band practice, where he and his band mates would play a few songs that almost didn’t sound absolutely horrible. Mondays meant talking about maybe getting a gig and then never doing anything to put such a thing in action. Mondays meant getting home late, watching crappy late-night television for about thirty minutes, and then going to bed in his underwear, ready to wash, rinse, and repeat the next morning.

 

Mondays always seemed to remind Frank how pathetic he’d become. He’d thought that life would be better after death. On the contrary, life only got worse.

 

After death, Frank’s alarm clock still went off at six thirty in the morning, but he no longer bothered with the snooze button. He no longer bothered with sleep. After death, Frank no longer bothered with rushed showers. He no longer bothered with sweating. After death, Frank no longer bothered with breakfast. For the most part, he no longer bothered with eating.

 

On Mondays, Frank arrived at Toro’s Floral by seven in the morning. Ray was never up and about by that time, but it didn’t matter much. Frank had a key - Ray had trusted him enough to give him one - so he let himself in and set to his typical chores. Mondays meant sweeping up the soil that had spilled from jostled flower pots. Mondays meant wiping down counters that were already mostly clean. Mondays meant pulling the odd dead leaf from the plants as he did his rounds with Ray’s watering can in the greenhouse. Mondays meant being finished with all of that before eight and having enough time left over to make coffee in the back room before Ray appeared to open shop.

 

Ray was a fair boss. He smiled often even if he never spoke much, except to sometimes say thanks for a job well done or to give polite instruction. Frank was never really sure how to take the thanks, but he was good at following directions. Since he never bothered to speak much either, the typical absence of conversation that followed was appreciated.

 

On Mondays, Frank clocked out at noon and headed for his second job at the garage, where he fixed cars and lied to honest people about how much it would cost as per his boss’s orders. He might have felt guilty about that aspect of his job before he’d died, but he didn’t feel much of anything after. He could not feel the grease on his hands as he tightened bolts, he did not recognize the slip of his fingers as he replaced parts and tweaked faulty wiring, and he did not feel sorry for the sad sack of shit who was unlucky enough to get his defunct car towed to the overpriced garage were Frank spent his afternoons.

 

Frank took no breaks because he needed none. He spoke no words unless he was spoken to. He worked diligently from the start of his shift to the very end, when he would clock out and leave, lost once again in the flurry of foot traffic before he could be noticed. People were always better kept at a distance, which was no different in death than in life, except that this time Frank’s reasoning had more to do with discretion than introversion.

 

On Mondays, Frank returned to his complex at seven pm on the dot and climbed the stairs to his piece-of-shit apartment. There, he would practice guitar with fingers that no longer felt the pain of callouses, binge something on Netflix that was thoughtless and certain to never invest his undivided interest, or sit outside on the fire escape and watch the world go by, growing and changing without him as he faded away within the void that his absence of life had left behind.

 

Mondays signaled the beginning of a week of pretending - pretending to care about hours spent toiling away peaking under the hoods of cars that belonged to people he could never care about, pretending to be affected by the disruption of history repeating itself in the news and Mother Nature kicking humanity’s ass with natural disasters, pretending to be __alive__. Frank wasn’t alive. He just couldn’t seem to die, either.

 

~

 

It was a gloomy Monday in the end of November. The alarm had screeched, the news was full of horrible things that Frank didn’t care about, and he unlocked the front door of Toro’s Floral at seven am, as per usual. What was perhaps a tad unusual - though probably not incredibly unusual to any person who knew him well enough - was that he was a might clumsy that morning. He’d tripped over his little piles of soil while sweeping and scattered the dirt further on the concrete. He forgot not to lean on the wet counters and smudged them with his elbows. He dropped the tin watering can, resulting in an awful crashing noise. He couldn’t get the damn coffee machine to turn on. By the time Ray made his way down into the shop from the apartment upstairs, the store was in worse shape than it had been when he’d gone to bed the night before. Ray, however, knew him very well despite Frank’s best efforts, and had expected as much with considerable patience.

 

“Rough morning?” Despite the early hour, there was a smile in his voice when he spoke.

 

Frank grunted in something like agreement as he jammed his finger into the “on” button. He knew that it wasn’t going to miraculously come to life after the 67th jab, but he was nothing if not persistent and spiteful. “You could say that.”

 

Ray nudged him away from the counter gently with his hip, the contact warm - almost impossibly warm - to his own death-cold skin. Frank tried his best to ignore the way his stomach twisted because of it.

 

Ray looked at the machine for a total of two seconds before he smiled with gentle pity at his employee and plugged it in.

 

“I’d have figured it out eventually,” Frank grumbled, knowing full and well that “eventually” would have taken a good while to arrive were he left to his own devices.

 

Ray patted his back in a valiant attempt at reassurance, though his hands were warm enough to almost burn Frank’s re-animated corpse. “Of course, Frank,” he said. “I have complete faith in your capabilities.”

 

As Frank didn’t know what to do with that statement, he left the vicinity under the guise of attempting to sweep the main floor again.

 

~

 

Business was slow on that Monday, so Frank spent the morning re-sweeping the eventually-clean floors of the main shop and pacing in the greenhouse. He claimed he was on the lookout for dead leaves or growing buds, but how they might simply appear in the ten seconds that Frank spent looking away, Ray didn’t ask. It was the end of the month. Frank always tended to stay out of the way at the end of the month. Ray new better than to ask.

 

Frank clocked out at noon, just like usual, but as he was making his way through the main shop and towards the exit, Ray stopped him with a firmly gentle hand. “I just wanted to thank you for all of your help,” he admitted. His voice was delicate, like a summer breeze through the grass. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

 

 _ _You’d have a clean place of business, to start with__ , Frank thought as he squirmed under the weight of Ray’s praise. He bit this back, however, and mumbled back a simple, “It’s no trouble.”

 

“But it __is__ , Frank,” Ray insisted. “I can’t afford to pay you anywhere near what you deserve, and I know I definitely don’t pay you enough to be this dedicated. But here you are, fighting with my coffee-maker and guarding my plants with your life.” The twinkle in Ray’s odd, golden eyes said that he was teasing in good humor. “I just want you to know that I appreciate you and all that you do for my shop.”

 

“Really, it’s no problem,” Frank asserted, fidgeting under the weight of Ray’s praise and using his only excuse to escape further compliments. “I have to get to my shift at the garage, man. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

 

Ray smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling softly. “Then I’ll see you later, Frank.” His voice was almost knowing, though Frank wasn’t sure what it was that Ray was supposed to be knowing. He only had one secret, and he was pretty sure that his boss wouldn’t continue to pay him his mediocre wages if he knew.

 

~

 

The wind had picked up by the time that Frank finally arrived at the garage. The cold didn’t bother him, though. He couldn’t feel it.

 

Frank knew his shift would be long before it even started. As soon as he entered the building, he was tasked with un-sticking a locked up brake caliper for a hysterical teenage girl who’d been in the middle of ditching school when her car started shaking. Not only did he have to deal with her breathing down his neck from the waiting room, but her father was on his way to the garage as well. There was going to be teenager-in-trouble crying and Frank was not looking forward to it.

 

In addition to all of that mess, it was the end of the month. He was clumsier than usual, cranky for his clumsiness, and his stomach was twisting and seizing. It couldn’t be helped. This always happened at the end of the month. Despite this, Frank worked hard because he always worked hard. Work broke up the monotony of existence. Even as his hands slipped and he dropped his tools at his feet, he pushed forward diligently.

 

The end of his shift could not come soon enough.

 

~

 

It was raining by the time Frank got off work. He registered the way that it drenched his shirt, and he could feel the beads of water falling into his hair and running down his neck and back. His flesh adamantly refused to flush with the chill or put in the effort of erecting goose bumps.

 

He made his way down the sidewalk slowly, careful not to inhale the tempting scents that surrounded him in his weakened, end-of-the-month state. Holding his breath wasn’t too hard, as he didn’t need to breathe, but it was still better that his destination wasn’t particularly far away. Foot traffic was heavy in that part of town and he certainly didn’t need the extra enticement.

 

Frank lived and worked on the edge of town on purpose, that purpose being it’s close proximity to the surrounding woods. He hadn’t owned a car in life because he couldn’t afford it, and he didn’t own a car in death because he could be spending that money on concert tickets or band tee. He could just as easily walk to his destinations. That was usually fine, as it killed the extra time he had before and after work, but it was acutely inconvenient on that Monday in November with the rain in his eyes and the ache in his stomach. It was a struggle to control himself, the delicious heat of passersby engulfing him. He was a fool for letting the hunger get bad again.

 

At the edge of civilization, where the concrete met dirt and grass and trees, Frank paused. With no delectable heat to distract him, he could focus. He looked around. He listened closely. He sniffed the air. He was alone, but he wouldn’t be for long.

 

Frank broke out into a sprint, breaking through the treeline gracefully and with inhuman speed. He could almost sense the heat of live flesh somewhere out of sight, smell the faintest whiff of something promising, and he followed it with all the shrewd absorption of a predator.

 

In death, his limits were no longer as clearly set, his lungs no longer struggling to take in air as they had in life. His muscles no longer strengthened or decayed; therefore, he felt no strain on them as he bounded through the trees.

 

Frank was not silent by any means while hunting for his next meal, but he moved with agility as he bounded over logs, his feet hardly making contact with the ground as he searched for something to sate his appetite. His prey never seemed to see him coming.

 

This month’s meal was a doe, a little on the lean side but easily supplemented with a few rabbits. There was terror in her eyes as he wrangled her to the ground and bit into her flesh.

 

Frank had been a vegan in life. The act of murdering an animal was just as atrocious in life as it was in death. He might have been tempted to just consume human flesh instead - humans were cruel and easily expendable - but he really didn’t want to spend the rest of his un-life in jail for murder. There were a couple of bands that he wanted to see in concert first. He had to remind himself of this as he stared down at the doe’s mutilated corpse.

 

He could see the fear in her eyes as he bit into her flesh, her warm, fresh blood running down his chin as he drank in great gulps between mouthfuls of fur and fat and internal organs. The rain beat at his back as she died, pained screams tearing from her throat. He wished that he could kill her and make the the pain go away, but it was out of the question. She would only fulfil him as long as she was alive. Her heart would be the last thing he ate.

 

~

 

Frank left the doe’s body where it lie. The buzzards would take care of it. If they didn’t, it was highly unlikely that anyone would suspect him of illegal hunting - if you could even call that sort of gruesome murder “hunting”. He was careful. He always had to be careful.

 

About a mile from the road, Frank had stashed clean clothes inside of a weather-proof bag and hidden it inside of a hollowed out tree the month before. He would have to do something about the set that was covered in blood at some point, but he stuffed them into the bag for the time being, replacing his ruined clothes with clean ones for the walk back to his apartment.

 

The rain had slowed to a light mist and the clouds obscured the moon. He walked home by the light of the street lamps, their orange glow casting strange shapes into the puddles on the street below. There were very few people out at that time of night, but it wouldn’t have mattered much to Frank if there had been more foot traffic. His hunger was appeased for the month. Strangers would be in no immediate danger around him for a while, and he could safely continue his preferred method of existing anonymously.

 

Back in his apartment, Frank set to work preparing for the next month. The kitchen sink was filled with bleach water for soaking his bloodied tee shirt. Clorox wipes were employed in the removal of residual blood from the inside of his bag. His scrubbed his jeans with such ferocity that any normal man’s fingers might have been made raw. When he was finished, he threw his clothes in the washing machine and set his bag - complete with a new set of replacement clothes - out on the table so that he wouldn’t forget to take it with him the next day. He’d drop it off in the woods after work.

 

Frank showered thoroughly before he let himself crawl into his bed to hide for the night. He was efficient, scrubbing the left over meat from under his fingernails and drowning the evidence in his hair with shampoo. There was no point in lingering under the spray when all the necessary tasks were finished. Though the water was turned to a heat just slightly beyond boiling, he felt nothing but the texture of the water as it pounded into his skin.

 

~

 

Frank did not sleep that night because he no longer slept any night. Instead, he up curled under the covers with his phone, some mindless sitcom droning on in the background. He had six more hours until his alarm would screech once again, heralding in a new day that Frank would attend more than experience.

 

Life was not life for Frank. Life was an endless cycle of existence, bland and unchanging just as it had been before he’d downed 50 Xanax with a bottle of whiskey and then jumped off the closest bridge. The only difference now was that he knew for a fact that there was no escape.

 

As he played his fifteenth virtual solitaire game in a row and half-listened to the trashy, late-night sitcom, he wondered idly what it would take to escape the cycle of monotony and finally set himself free. The answer, as he would soon discover, was nothing like he’d ever stopped to consider.

**Author's Note:**

> Constructive criticism and unrepentant ass-kissing are both welcome here. Feel free to leave a comment!


End file.
